The 'but why?' link is fascinating: https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/not-fade-away-preventive-...
> While these measures will not stop fading from occurring altogether, they will ensure that these world-famous prints fade so slowly that they will be seen by countless generations of visitors to the Museum in the future.
This trade-off is interesting, are we maximizing for number of people watching works? Or are we purely maximizing time? Because its not obvious to me that more people will see a work if it lasts 1000 more years but spends 80% of that time in storage, vs lasting 100 more years spending 0% of the time in storage.
Also lets say you go to the museum today and are lucky that it happens to be on display. But your friend travels to see it, it happens to be in 80% storage time, then the friend goes back home and dies without seeing it so that some future person that doesn't exist yet even can see it later without fading. Why is the future person more important than the current person, in a sense?
Storing it assumes a lot, that humanity will survive, that people will be interested in seeing it, that some fire isn't going to destroy their storage, etc. Meanwhile real life people would've seen it already. I don't have an answer, just questions though.
Though I'd imagine mostly its going to be a random sample of people that happen to be there that day. I imagine there's likely under 1% of museum visitors actually chasing single works and planning trips like that. So most people that would see it are still just random "museum people" (which under the "interest" metric is still better than purely random people).
I personally don't get this attitude, but I also don't understand a lot of what draws people to museums when we have photographs of works of art. Which is not to say that I don't get why people view works i n person. I just don't understand neurotically trying to preserve a physical work when the author likely didn't even care that much or consider a more preservable medium to begin with.
I'm not clear that the original artist's materials, with respect to longevity is really relevant, assuming the artist didn't explicitly intend it to be ephemeral.
With that being said, I’m sure they could make a replica that would be almost impossible to tell apart from the real. After all, this technique was specifically invented for mass production.
Is there another option? Even sculpture hewn from rock is ephemeral.
As for why these pieces should be preserved even if their creators were sometimes sloppy about doing the original legwork. Well, in the case of many famous works, they're literal pieces of history dude. Choosing how often and when to display them isn't just about "optimizing viewership". These aren't blog posts or IG reels. It's also about saving their literal existence for as long as possible.
Just 200 years ago, in a world without most of the technologies we take for granted today, art played a fundamentally representative role in stretching the boundaries of ideas, imagination, possibilities, and in extension, human cognition and social impact.
Preservation is the point. Art is made in the moment. Yeah there can be scientifically proven ways of longer-lasting / preservable mediums, inks/paints, etc. Pieces of art capture inspirations and ideas of the creators and pass that feeling along to future generations to also be inspired with new ideas for their times. They can be a snapshot of one place, at one moment in time, but they can also be timeless.
We should auction off the visitor spots, then.
0: https://www.munch.no/en/The-Scream/where-can-i-see-the-screa...
An example: my partner is working in a relatively expensive "wellness" service. Some people reserve and never show up even though they have reserved for a whole family and lose more than a thousand euros. I am pretty sure a lot of people that cannot afford this service at this price on a regular basis would if it was less expensive for them. I know I do as I only profit from it because I have a 50% discount and my partner doesn't have to pay so we pay a quarter of the price everytime we go together.
So making it an auction and you would still see a mix of interested people and vain but wealthy people for which paying for this would still be pocket change and would just take an "I've been there" selfie and move on without really being interested in the artwork itself. So more money for the museum but not necessarily representative of the interest of the visitors.
Arguably there's more educational value and more chance of a visitor serendipitously encountering something that speaks to them if the museum has a big set of prints rotated through, rather than a more static one. After all, even if you haven't ever seen an original of the Great Wave you almost certainly already know the image and it's likely already made most of the impact on you that it ever will...
When visiting DC, do we really think the Constitution under all of that glass is the actual Constitution? POTUS seems to think he has the actual, so there's conflict right there. For a document as beloved as the Constitution, why would you ever risk the original?
That's a damn good question actually, and for many other works in other places, like, say, the Magna Carta, or the Declaration of Independence. To the Wikipediamobile ADHDMan!
For example, if you go to the Wikipedia page on the Taj Mahal, they plainly explain that the tombs that tourists see daily, of the Mughal emperor and his wife, aren't the real tombs. Those are down in the basement, below the fake ones.